Our Crowdfunding Groups
Good morning friends! I hope you are enjoying the warmer weather and the prospect of Spring.
I wanted to provide a quick update on our project. The students and I have been meeting to select buildings on campus for survey, working through protocols, and setting up a data collection system for use with phones (see attached photo). Our goal is to be up and running in the next two weeks and ready for the spring migration.
In addition, we are please to have an undergraduate student completing an independent study examining our glass Blacksburg Transit bus stops for bird collisions. Her work will describe the settings around these stops and, hopefully, provide some insight as to what factors may contribute to bird collisions.
We have also taken a leadership role in engaging our college and university colleagues across the state in launching their own window collision surveys. We are working with Radford University, Bridgewater College, and Ferrum College and hope to coordinate with ongoing activities at Virginia Commonwealth University as well. If we all implement similar protocols, then hopefully we can use the information we collect to learn more about collisions across the state and provide opportunities for our students to gain experience, build networks, and broaden their perspectives on this issue. Very exciting!
Thanks again for your support of our project. Please remember to monitor our Facebook page for progress and report any collisions you observe via our reporting page .
Scott
Good morning! Thank you all again for your support of our Bird-Window Collision project. I wanted to post a quick message to keep you up to speed on our activities.
We have completed our kick off meetings with the undergraduate students. It was great to meet them and see their enthusiasm for this project. Since we are focused on finishing the Fall semester strong, we decided to ramp up our activities first thing this Spring. Here are some of the tasks we are planning:
- collision surveys for buildings at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center and Main Campus
- collision surveys at glass bus stops around campus and town
- collaboration with groups from other college campuses around Virginia to implement surveys across the state during the Spring migration period.
These are some great opportunities, and we look forward to keeping you updated with our progress in the New Year. Until then, have a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season!
Scott
Our campaign is set to close on Friday. I wanted to thank each of you for your donation and assure you that, no matter what amount is raised, we will move forward with our project. In fact, our first organizational meeting is today! So far, we have 16 students interested in helping us survey and start formulating research questions. We have received window collision reports from all over the US and will be working to add those to a larger, national database through iNaturalist. Other groups have reached out to us including the Wildlife Center of Virginia, the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, and CollidEscape/ABC bird tape. We have set up both a website and a Facebook page to engage people on this issue - and all of this before we really get going!
Thank you again for supporting us! We will not let you down.
Scott
The Bird-Window Collision Project is featured on VT news today. Thanks so much for your support of our efforts! We couldn't do it without you.
https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2017/10/cnre-birdwindowcollisions.html
We want to keep things moving forward for our crowdfund campaign. We posted a video this morning outlining our project, along with some of the team members. Thanks to everyone who has already supported the project and to those that helped put the video together.
Scott
What can I say? On behalf of the team Thank you! Our launch day total has already put us over 10% towards our goal. The support is inspirational, exciting, and humbling. Thanks to all our Day 1 supporters!
Scott
Our project team is excited to have the opportunity to be a part of the first campus-wide roll out of the new JUmP platform! Our work researching bird-window collisions began in 2013 when Becky Schneider decided to do something about the shocking number of bird collisions with our office windows. That project was a great success and was featured on a number of news outlets including the VT front page news in November of 2014.
Even without dedicated funding, this initial project lasted 19 months (Oct 2013 – May 2015), but with the launching of the JUmP platform we are ready to get back at it! Thanks for visiting and be sure to check out our project pages online and on Facebook
This species had the greatest number of observed window kills. Your $7 donation will support our work for approximately the cost of five pounds of birdseed.
Dark-eyed juncos are winter visitors that frequently fall victim to reflective glass. Your $16 contribution will help reduce window strikes - one of many threats to migratory birds.
Cedar waxwings travel in flocks, leading to group collisions with windows. Your donation of $24 will cover the cost of a student researcher for a day.
American robin fledglings are particularly susceptible to collisions with reflective glass. Your donation of $57 provides $1 for each of the bird species identified in our pilot project.
Woodpeckers like the yellow-bellied sapsucker are often fooled by reflections of lone trees . Your donation of $129 will cover the cost of an undergraduate researcher for a week.
Common nighthawks are just one of the species in dramatic decline. We documented 242 different individual bird deaths in one research park during our pilot study. This giving level recognizes each of those fatalities with a $1 donation.